


Brief Meetings

by underoriginal



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Competent Jesse McCree, Deadlock Gang, Gen, Mild Suicidal Ideation, Not a ship, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-22
Updated: 2017-04-22
Packaged: 2018-10-22 18:52:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10703013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/underoriginal/pseuds/underoriginal
Summary: A series of encounters between Hanzo Shimada and the man who eventually became Jesse McCree.





	Brief Meetings

Hanzo Shimada was not a coward. He was not a fool. He was not incompetent. He was, however, the sixteen year old heir of a massive criminal empire. He was also in the United States, a country that was more than willing to detain sixteen year olds with ties to criminal empires regardless of evidence. On top of that, he missed his flight. 

That wasn’t his fault. His first flight had been late and his second flight was long gone by the time his plane touched down in Santa Fe. He had the money to buy a new plane ticket, but that credit card was tied to his legal name and he didn’t want to risk drawing any unnecessary attention to himself. He would find a hotel for the night, buy a plane ticket through an offshore account, and get on the first flight next morning. 

The closest hotel was a cheap, run down pile of garbage, but it was the only one in walking distance and he had no American cash for a taxi. The lecture he would receive from his elders when he got home was practically writing itself. He didn’t even have a fake ID.

He paid with his card, hoping the tired looking woman wouldn’t look up the information of a random client. He probably could have come up with an alternative, but he was exhausted. Travel drained him and the hotel was a mile from the airport. 

He laid his possessions out on the threadbare mattress, taking stock of what he had. Most of his luggage would reach Japan before he did. He had his bow, passing it off as a priceless antique, and the tools to make arrows. Besides that, he had his wallet, his phone, his laptop, chargers, and a tourist’s Japanese-English dictionary. His English was passable, but it helped to have an easy reference. Feigning ignorance was also a useful strategy.

He made the necessary phone calls to his father and the clan elders and settled in to watch the news. He could barely understand the English of the locals, but newscasters always used the same, comprehensible accent. He wanted to reassure himself that he hadn’t forgotten all his English. As tired as he was, the change in accent didn’t help much. He perked up though when his family was mentioned. 

Through the haze of exhaustion, he only managed to catch a few simple words. They were talking about his family, and that someone was looking for the where. Wait, no, that didn’t make sense. The where? And something about air? What did the Shimada have to do with the atmosphere? And what the hell was the Efbee- His mind screeched to a halt. FBI. FBI were looking for the heir. Looking for his whereabouts. Hanzo hadn’t heard that word before, but he figured it out pretty quickly. 

They knew where he was. 

He strung his bow and hastily put some arrows together. One sonic, three scatter. His phone buzzed and he answered it quickly. 

“You need to get out of there,” his father said.

“I know. I don’t have transport.”

“I’m on the line with a local gang. They can shelter you. They will expect recompense, but we can negotiate that later. The contact will give you my sign.”

The line went dead. They didn’t dare keep it open for longer than strictly necessary. Hanzo found a relatively safe perch and strung one of his arrows, waiting.

Three minutes later, there was a knock on the door. If he hadn’t heard the footsteps approaching, Hanzo probably would have screamed.

“Room service!” a thickly accented American voice called.

Hanzo said nothing. 

“Got you that fancy shit. It’s, uh-” The stranger’s fumbling attempts at Japanese were even more incomprehensible than his English, but Hanzo recognized Sojiro’s signal.

He opened the door, peering through the crack. The boy facing him couldn’t have been any older than Hanzo himself, probably younger. He wore torn and faded jeans, combat boots, and a tacky leather vest with spikes sewn into it. Hanzo suspected he might have made some attempt to comb his hair, but if that was the case, it raised more questions than it answered. Was it even possible to fail to figure out how a comb worked?

“You comin’?” the boy asked. 

Hanzo nodded sharply, throwing his things together. He really did not like the idea of taking shelter with a gang without establishing payment first, but if it came to that, the Shimada could break a foreign gang much more easily than a foreign military.

The boy brought him out the back door to a waiting taxi. When Hanzo got in, he noticed that the driver was cuffed to the door. The boy sat down next to Hanzo, holding his gun idly in his lap.

“You don’t have your own drivers?” Hanzo asked contemptuously. 

“Fuck you, man. I don’t have my permit yet.”

“My name is not man. You will address me as Hanzo.”

The boy shrugged. “Whatever you say, sugarpie.” 

Hanzo growled but didn’t push it. He didn’t want to rack up more debt than he had to. 

When they were a few miles out of town, the boy let the driver go. “Tell the cops whatever you want in a week, but if you talk before then, I’ll hunt your family down and kill them.” He gave the driver a hundred dollar bill and ushered Hanzo away. 

“You should have killed him.”

“Nah, we kill him and we lead the cops right here. Give him a week to start misrememberin’ shit and they’ll never find us.”

The boy led him on a brief walk until they were out of sight of the place they were dropped off. Then he took out an ancient radio. “Hey, boss. Got the guy you wanted. Deadeye out.”

“Deadeye?” 

“Yeah, that’s my name.” 

Hanzo just stared at him. “I will not call you anything so ridiculous. And you forgot to tell your boss our coordinates.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Deadeye gestured at his ankle and Hanzo saw the tracker anklet.

He drew his bow, leveling an arrow at Deadeye’s chest. “They sent someone with a tracker to pick me up? Are you trying to get me killed?”

Deadeye held his hands out to the side, but didn’t like bothered at all. “Don’t worry about it. My parole officer’s Deadlock too.” 

Hanzo didn’t relax.

“Hey, you ain’t broken any laws, technically speaking. We get caught, they’ll throw me in the slammer way before you.” 

It took Hanzo a moment to decipher his words, but he finally lowered the bow. “One wrong move and I will kill you before you can blink.”

“Got it.” Deadeye gave him a thumbs up. A fucking thumbs up. 

Thankfully, a car pulled up not a minute later and took Hanzo to safety. He made a point to avoid Deadeye until he made it home to Japan a week later. He never wanted to see him again.

~*~

When Hanzo was eighteen, Deadlock finally called in their debt. They requested Hanzo personally to help them guard a shipment. According to their intelligence, both the FBI and a dedicated Overwatch task force would be using this shipment as bait to draw them out, but they couldn’t afford not to bite.

Hanzo came prepared this time. He had multiple quivers of arrows and a fake ID. The plan was to go on a smaller operation before the shipment came in, plant the idea that the Shimada were involved and force Overwatch at least to turn their attention overseas.

It was a simple plan and an elegant one. Hanzo approved. He did not approve of the partner Deadlock had given him. 

“Howdy, partner.” Deadeye had obviously matured since Hanzo had last been forced to suffer his presence. He was a good head taller than Hanzo now and had the beginnings of a scruffy beard. He also had on a shirt this time. It was an eye searing orange, thankfully covered by the old vest, which had lost most of his spikes.

“That is not my name. What’s the plan?” 

An older member of the gang gave out the orders. For a gang of untrained thugs, they could put together an effective plan when they really wanted to. Hanzo would withhold judgement on how well they carried those plans out.

It did not take long for his judgement to return full force. They were pinned down by the Overwatch strike force. Hanzo had one arrow left and he was saving it to unleash the dragons if he had no other choice. Deadeye hadn’t shot once. 

“If you aren’t going to use your gun, let me borrow it,” Hanzo snapped.

“Gimme a minute,” Deadeye said. His eyes were fixed on his watch. He had to squint to read it, given the shadows from the corner he was hiding in. 

Hanzo considered just grabbing Deadeye’s gun, but the last thing he wanted was to explain to the clan elders why he got captured scuffling with an ally while they were surrounded by enemies. He sighed. Shock and awe was less than ideal if he couldn’t follow it up, but that’s what he had.

He nocked his final arrow, stepped out of cover, and unleashed the dragons. They roared down the narrow alley and Hanzo could feel them on his arm, chewing their way through his foes. Not all of them though. A few were still standing. Maybe half a dozen. He was still outnumbered and now he was unarmed. He swore. 

“Sweetheart, I ain’t got the faintest idea what you just said, but I got a feeling I agree with the sentiment.” 

Hanzo whirled around and grabbed Deadeye by the throat. “What the fuck was that? You did nothing. We are going to be killed now, do you understand? I am going to die in fucking America because you refused to do anything.” 

Deadeye wheezed and pried Hanzo off him with surprising strength. “It ain’t over yet, sweetheart. I still got a full clip.”

What the hell. It’s not like they had anything else to lose. Hanzo stood out of the way. 

Deadeye winked at him and drew his gun. In the bright mid-morning sun, it almost looked like he was glowing. He drew his gun and fired seven times. Seven screams were cut brutally short. “Time to go,” Deadeye said. “I ain’t finna stick around until reinforcements show up.”

Three days after Hanzo returned to Japan, the Deadlock gang fell. Overwatch didn’t appreciate losing so many troops and they sent an elite division. Hanzo looked through the mugshots of the few taken alive with morbid curiosity. He recognized a few of the faces. Deadeye wasn’t on the list of the ones captured alive. He was dead, then. What a pity, Hanzo thought. He had pretty good aim.

~*~

The years passed and with each month, the pressure on the Shimada family increased. Overwatch was growing too big, too powerful. It stopped bothering with things like respecting the sovereignty of the nations in which it operated. The Shimada had strong ties in the Japanese government. They had none in Overwatch.

Eventually, the situation grew so dire that Sojiro called for a truce. Overwatch would allow the Shimada to continue some of their operations, under certain provisions, and the Shimada would give them all the help they needed with rival clans.

Sojiro was not foolish enough to go to the meeting himself, so he sent Hanzo to lead the negotiations. Hanzo had nothing in his record that couldn’t be explained away as youthful delinquency. No one ever found about his connections to Deadlock. Overwatch had not yet grown so bold as to arrest him without warrant in his own country. At least, Hanzo hoped so.

Hanzo brought a bodyguard out of propriety, but he had his own sword at his hip too. Just a cultural symbol suitable for meeting foreign ambassadors. No need to find out how sharp the blade was.

The diplomat from Overwatch was a tall, slim woman in a perfectly tailored blue suit. She introduced herself as Yurima Bautista and her bodyguard as David Fuentes. 

Hanzo found himself oddly intrigued by the bodyguard. Fuentes was tall and well muscled, almost obsessively neat, but still managing a casual air that kept Hanzo or his bodyguard from assuming he was about to attack. The sunglasses he never took off were a bit cliche, but Hanzo had showed up to the meeting with a wakizashi so he really couldn’t comment.

Once the negotiations began, Hanzo paid little attention to the bodyguard. Bautista was cunning, trying to twist the deal into something that destroy the Shimada without ever making it obvious enough that Hanzo could call her on it without looking paranoid. Hanzo slipped in his own loopholes and extra clauses. He would have enjoyed this duel of wits if the stakes had not been so high. 

The discussions went on for several hours before they finally wrapped up for the afternoon. One of the terms Bautista had insisted on was that Hanzo and his bodyguard would stay with the small Overwatch contingent until the end of negotiations. It grated to essentially be held hostage, but Hanzo understood the logic. He knew some people in the clan wanted to just murder the ambassadors and be done with it. Sojiro would be able to calm their tempers if he pointed out the potential cost of losing the heir. 

At least Overwatch had been polite enough to pay for a nice hotel. Hanzo was on the second floor from the top with his bodyguard. High enough up that he couldn’t escape down, but still a floor between him and rooftop escape. Smart. Annoying, but smart. He checked his cell signal. Blocked, of course. No signalling for any plan.

He passed the evening meditating, turning over the deal in his mind, searching for weak points, ways to make sure it could be twisted to his advantage. It was a soothing puzzle when he didn’t have a foe.

A knock on the door jolted him out of his meditation. He waved a hand and the automatic door opened. Fuentes walked in, still wearing his sunglasses. He looked sober. “Shimada. There’s-” He stopped, rubbed a hand over his face. Something about his accent seemed almost familiar, but Hanzo couldn’t ponder it, too distracted by the anxiety twisting in his gut. 

“What is it?” he asked coldly.

“I really shouldn’t be the one to tell you this. I can call someone for you-”

“Spit it out,” Hanzo ordered, his eyes flashing. The dragons were writhing under his skin. Something was horribly wrong.

“Sojiro Shimada is dead.”  
No. Impossible. He must have misunderstood. Bautista and Fuentes were talking to each other in Spanish before. Could be slang he doesn’t know about. Could be a lapse in his own vocabulary. It couldn’t, couldn’t be true.

It took him a painful minute to reply, but his face gave no hint of his swirling emotions. “Explain.” 

Fuentes invited himself in. He placed his gun on the table by the door and leaned against the opposite wall. It was a six-shot revolver, an antique. Looked like something out of a western. Hanzo couldn’t tear his eye away from it. It added a whole layer of surreality to the situation, a comforting hint that what he heard could not have been real.

“Sojiro Shimada is dead,” Fuentes repeated once he had made himself nonthreatening. “It wasn’t Overwatch. We have records and video of every one of our members, if you want to check for yourself. Looks like an assassination, but we haven’t sent anyone in to investigate.” 

Hanzo nodded. “Show me.” 

Fuentes showed him the few glimpses he had of the crime scene. He went to get the records, but Hanzo stopped him.

“I will talk with Bautista-san.”

“You sure? We won’t mind if you take some ti-”

“I will talk with Bautista-san. Bring her.”

The deal wasn’t nearly as complex or detailed as he had planned. Thirty day cessation of all operations for both sides to let the family mourn. Hanzo took the title as head of the clan with Overwatch and the elders both looming over him, waiting for him to slip up. In the desperate race for power, he made the worst decision of his life. 

He killed his brother. 

~*~

Genji didn’t get much chance to fight back, but he got enough. While Hanzo was trapped in a hospital bed, waiting for his legs to heal enough to attach prosthetics, he had a lot of time to think. He had already given too much to the clan that he knew was doomed. Genji’s life should have been the last straw, and it was, but it was too little too late.

As soon as he was strong enough, he left the clan and never came back. He heard rumors of Overwatch operations, of a single assassin killing each member of the family one by one. He spared a brief thought to wish he had the will to do the same and moved on with his life.

He took jobs as a mercenary, mostly, and it didn’t take him long to make a new name for himself and a new set of enemies. The price on his head wasn’t terribly high, but that just meant people thought they could take him. Throw enough idiots at a problem and one of them would get lucky eventually. 

It was New Years, which meant that no one looked twice at Hanzo as he staggered through the streets, clutching his stomach. In fact, when he finally collapsed in an alley, he nearly tripped over a man who was lost in a drunken haze.

Hanzo sat next to him, looking him over. He was dressed as a cowboy, probably some bizarre costume party, and reeked of alcohol, but he was still awake. 

“Hey there, handsome,” the cowboy slurred. “Lookin’ for a place to spend the night?”

“Silence,” Hanzo ordered. He had no time to deal with this man and he had no idea if he had managed to shake his pursuers. He pulled his hood tighter over his head, hiding his face. 

“Aw, babe, don’t be like that. ‘M just tryna make friends.” The man rolled towards him, looking almost comically hurt at the rejection. 

“I am not your friend.”

“You could be my friend. I’m a friendly guy. We could be friends.” 

“Shut up!” Hanzo snapped and doubled over. Even that much activity sent waves of pain through his stomach. There was probably some internal bleeding, but Hanzo doubted it was enough that he needed to go to the hospital. Not like he would have gone anyway. Still, it was nice to know he wouldn’t die in an alley next to a drunken cowboy. At this point, he would take what he could get. The cowboy quieted down too, finally getting the message that he wasn’t welcome. 

Hanzo caught his breath and did what he could to patch the wound. There wasn’t much he could do, given that the punches to his gut hadn’t broken skin, but fussing around with it made him feel a bit better. He was too injured to draw his bow, but he had a pistol. It would draw attention to him if he fired, but the option was there.

Eventually, he felt strong enough to move on. He didn’t get up right away. The chance to rest was genuinely tempting. He could wait a bit before he moved on. He stretched out his legs, massaging the area where the prosthetics connected to the stump.

The cowboy let out a drunken giggle.

“What?” Hanzo demanded.

“Y’ever hear the one about the Japanese cyborg?”

Hanzo got up and left. Sharing an alley with a drunk cowboy who thought he was funny was irritating, but manageable. Sharing an alley with a drunk cowboy he could accurately guess his nationality without even seeing all of his face was enough to unnerve him.

He walked some distance away and then returned to the building by the alley to watch the cowboy from above. The cowboy passed a few minutes singing garbled songs and then got up and walked away with a steady stride.

Hanzo caught a glimpse of the gun at his hip. Six shot revolver. Even that fit his image, but Hanzo didn’t doubt he knew how to use it. No one learned to fake drunkenness that well without very good training.

No one with that kind of training could mean anything good for Hanzo.

~*~

Normally, Hanzo stayed away from bounties in the tens of millions. He didn’t need any money being traced back to him and no one gave away that much money without tracing where it went. But this was different. This was personal. 

He read over the file on Jesse McCree given to him by his employer. Known Aliases: Joel Morricone, Gabriel Morrison, Eduardo García, Chester Weeks, Jackson Reyes. Known Affiliations: half a dozen small time gangs as a contract killer or mercenary. Last Known Location: on a train to Santa Fe. Vanished before getting there.

The rest of the file was more of the same. No one seemed to know anything about this man except what he was capable of. Even then, various sources disagreed. Some said he was a highly trained soldier gone rogue, others said he had magic powers. Hanzo took the accusation of magic more seriously than most. The Shimada had never found another family with powers like the dragons, but neither were they arrogant enough to believe such a thing was impossible.

Still, the file was mostly useless. The only thing of particular interest to Hanzo was the list of those on the bounty. Jesse McCree was wanted dead and the groups that were willing to pay for his head pooled their bounties. It was a practical measure. Two assassins after the same target will kill the competition before the quarry.

It was no surprise to Hanzo that McCree, who styled himself as a justice-dispensing vigilante, had run afoul of both the Italian Mafia and the Russian Mafiya. The Yakuza donors intrigued him, mostly to see who still holds power in Japan. The few surviving Shimada had not spent what remained of their wealth to see McCree dead.

But of all the names that added up to the sixty million dollar price on the cowboy’s head, the one that caught Hanzo’s eye was the Pax 77. Masquerading as a group of spies or mercenaries for hire, the Pax 77 was a front for the most unsavory parts of Overwatch, the parts that not even the PETRAS Act and fall of Overwatch had fully drawn to light. The Pax 77 had set the first bounty. Three hundred thousand alive or one hundred thousand dead. Bounty posted one year before the fall of Overwatch.

A defector from Overwatch who promptly got on the shit list of everyone to whom he could have defected.

It took nearly a whole year, but on a cold night in February, Hanzo Shimada sat down on a barstool next to a haggard cowboy in a red serape with a prosthetic left arm.

Jesse McCree looked over at him. “I woulda left the bar eventually.” 

Hanzo nursed his vodka, his eyes fixed ahead. “I’m impatient.” He wanted answers that he couldn’t get from a corpse.

“Hell of a vice for a sniper.”

“So you do know who I am.”

McCree chuckled. “I’d recognize you anywhere.” He took a sip of his whiskey, chewing on the cigar in his teeth. “Do me a favor and wait until we get outside. The waitstaff aren’t paid nearly enough to clean up our mess.” 

“You aren’t going to try to run?”

“No need. I’m older than I was, but I’m as fast a draw as ever. Faster than you.” 

“You’re staking your life on that.” 

McCree studied him carefully, squinting like he was trying to count the atoms that made up Hanzo’s body. 

The silence wore on Hanzo as it stretched until he couldn’t bear it anymore. “I don’t suppose you would answer one question for me, given that we will likely not see each other again.”

“Shoot,” McCree said.

Hanzo nearly did before he remembered what that particular colloquialism meant. “What’s the one about the Japanese cyborg?” 

Confusion flashed across McCree’s face followed by recognition and grudging respect. “No idea,” he admitted. “I wanted to see if you knew a secret.”

“What secret?”

“Care to take a stab at what I’m gonna say next?”

Hanzo glared at him. “You are using those metaphors on purpose. I don’t appreciate it.” 

McCree rolled his eyes. “Next time you try to kill me, I’ll make sure to be more polite about it. Wouldn’t wanna offend nobody who’s plannin’ to knife me in the back.” There was a venom in his tone that surprised Hanzo. 

He stood up and fished some bills out of his pocket, then left through the back door. The tip was nearly double the price of the drink. Hanzo left his own payment and followed. 

McCree stood at the end of the alley, facing away. His gun was unholstered, pointing down. He was bathed in the glow of the street lamp, standing out like a sore thumb against his surroundings. Of course, that could have been just the red serape.

“How attached are you to that bow?” McCree asked, still not looking at him.

“If you damage it, I promise to kill you slowly and painfully.” 

“Good. I like a challenge.”

Hanzo was fed up with him, his casual mockery, his arrogance, his ability to completely vanish while dressed like a cowboy. He hated that McCree had managed to trick him and refused to take advantage of the opportunity. He drew his bow and fired.

McCree fired too. 

His gun flashed bright enough to blind Hanzo. When he blinked the bright spots out of his vision, he saw McCree standing there, gun back in the holster, and two fragments of an arrow on either side of him. 

McCree tipped his hat and walked away. Hanzo just stood there, stunned. He fled when he heard approaching sirens.

That night, he couldn’t sleep, kept awake by visions of the broken arrow. He didn’t mind though. It was better than images of his broken brother. 

~*~

Watchpoint: Gibraltar was not as impressive to Hanzo as it was to civilians who had not spent their lives breaking into well fortified buildings but it still filled him with a thrill of fear. He had no illusions that he would find forgiveness or redemption in the rubble of Overwatch, but he might find justice, and that would be enough.

Genji was alive. His brother was alive. The brother he had chopped to pieces in the hopes of securing his place in a dying clan was alive. 

At first, he had refused to believe it, tearing through his memories for any proof that Genji had to be dead. But the evidence stacked up against him. The doctors in the Overwatch contingent that had been in Hanamura that night. The assassin systematically dismantling the Shimada clan. The dragons. 

Even if it was a ploy to get him killed, Hanzo had no right to refuse. He could not claim it was unjust for Genji to kill him. So he forced himself to enter Gibraltar.

He came up the main road, passing through the gates to the massive entrance, practically feeling the eyes of the security cameras press down on him. Twenty feet away from the doors, he removed his bow and arrows and laid them carefully on the ground. 

“My name is Hanzo Shimada,” he called, barely keeping his voice from trembling. “I am here to find my-” He stopped. “I am here to find Genji Shimada.”

The doors opened and a massive man he recognized as the old hero Reinhardt brought him inside. Reinhardt searched him briskly and escorted him to a holding cell. “Genji told us you would come here, but he is not on the base right now. You will stay here until he returns.” 

Hanzo bowed his head. “I understand.”

Over the next few hours, he heard a number of arguments outside his cell. He couldn’t make them out, but heard the shouting. He noted idly that the amount of fury in the voices probably meant that at least one of them wanted him to live. Finally there was a massive crash and the voices became too quiet for Hanzo to hear. 

A few minutes later, the door opened and Jesse McCree walked in. Hanzo stared at him.

McCree wore a tshirt and jeans and his head was bare, but he still had the spurs and the infamous belt buckle. He sat across from Hanzo, the very image of a professional interrogator. He just held Hanzo’s gaze for a moment before his face split into a wide grin.

“So, I guess you know the one about the Japanese cyborg now.”

There was a moment where rage filled Hanzo to the point where he couldn’t breathe. McCree knew. A wannabe cowboy vigilante bounty hunter knew his brother was alive and didn’t tell him.

“I imagine the joke is less funny if you explain it,” he ground out.

McCree’s grin faded. “If I told you, I had no way to know if you would try to finish the job. Besides, it wasn’t my place to tell you.” 

The rage left Hanzo, replaced with a bitter emptiness. “How did you know him?” 

“I saved his life. Well, Dr. Ziegler saved his life and Lindholm built him his current body, but I was the one who found him still alive. I had a suspicion you would do something rash. You were too ready to take over.”

Hanzo absorbed all that with a blank expression. “You were in that contingent. In Overwatch.” 

“Blackwatch, technically. Our black ops unit. But yes.” 

An Overwatch agent in Hanamura with a six-shot revolver. “You were David Fuentes.” 

McCree nodded. “That’s the name I was using then. Jesse McCree’s the name my mama gave me, if you cared to know.”

Hanzo didn’t care. “You knew what I did. Why didn’t you kill me when you had the chance?”

“That wasn’t my decision to make. Genji made it very clear he wanted to kill you himself. After Overwatch fell apart, I figured I would find you and get a bead on you. Just satisfy my own curiosity. Then he tracks me down and tells me he wants to reconcile with you. Can’t say I understand it, but he’s my friend and I’ll respect his choice.”

“So then the decision has been made. Why are you bothering to-” Hanzo waved his hand. This wasn’t really an interrogation, but he obviously wasn’t free to go either. “Clearly your superiors intend to respect Genji’s decision, since I haven’t been shot yet.”

McCree’s expression turned serious. “Genji’s word means a lot and if he says that he forgives you for trying to murder him, we ain’t gonna factor that into our decisions. You’re still the disgraced mercenary heir of a criminal empire.” 

Hanzo laughed bitterly. “So this is his revenge, then? Force me into life in prison instead of a quick death? Clever.”

McCree scoffed. “Don’t be so dramatic. You wouldn’t be the worst we’ve taken in. Hell, when Reyes brought me in, I was seventeen, pissed off, and looking at a life sentence too. But he liked my aim, so he gave me a chance to work for him instead. Took me the better part of a decade to actually start trying to help people and dispense justice. Soon as I do, I find out how corrupt Overwatch really is.” He shook his head, refocused. “My point is, whether or not you join Overwatch is entirely up to you. Only folks past redemption are the ones that refuse to try.”

Hanzo didn’t want to think about redemption. The weight of his failures had worn into him until it felt like they were the only thing keeping him together. “What the hell did you to earn a life sentence at seventeen?”

McCree smirked. “Aw, sweetheart, you don’t remember me? I thought you forged a bond with people you fought with.”

The pieces slid together. “You’re Deadeye.” 

McCree fist pumped. “I knew I’d get you to say it someday!” Then he sobered. “Yeah, I’m Deadeye. Don’t carry that name as a title anymore, but it’s still there. But this ain’t about me. It’s about you. Are you gonna join us?”

Hanzo sighed. “Are there any other people here who I don’t know I’ve known my whole life or are you the only one?” 

McCree shrugged sheepishly. “I’m the only one I know about.”

This was all pointless, but Hanzo had known from the start what his answer would be. “I’m only here because Genji wants me to be. If he wants me to fight for Overwatch, I will, but do not expect me to pretend I believe in making a better world or dispensing justice. I am here only to try and pay a debt.”

McCree laughed. “You know, I said the same thing when I joined up, just a lot louder and a lot angrier.” He held out his hand. “Welcome to Overwatch.” 

Hanzo took his hand.

**Author's Note:**

> The Pax 77 is my own invention. It was Gabe's personal fallback operation to maintain the peace if Overwatch failed. [insert you-tried star]
> 
> Please review if you liked it.


End file.
